WG Discussion Points: What Tim Walz Said
About The Electoral College
WG Discussion Points | David Winston
October 11, 2024
Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz made headlines this week as he called for eliminating the Electoral College. From the New York Times: Twice during campaign fund-raisers on the West Coast, Mr. Walz said he would prefer that presidential candidates did not have to focus on a few political battlegrounds and could instead focus on winning votes from across the country. 'I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go... we need a national popular vote...' He clearly knows this change would favor Democrats, but what he may not realize is that it would heavily weight the result in favor of two states: California and New York.
In our September 6 Discussion Points, we wrote about how California makes up a large portion of Democrats' popular vote margins. In 2020, about 72% of Biden's popular vote margin came from California. But this is not just a one-time occurrence. From 2008 forward, a combined 64% of Democrats' popular vote margin came from California. Adding in New York, a staggering 96% of Democrats' popular vote margin came from those two blue states alone. The other 48 states only made up a paltry 4% of their party's popular vote margin, making the rest of the country almost irrelevant to the Democratic Party's national vote totals.
